What About All Those Articles?

As you read through news related to what you do, you probably glance at hundreds of article listings per month. Out of those hundreds of articles, you probably select dozens that seem worth reading. Out of the dozens of articles you read, maybe a handful are worth remembering.

In That Case

Based on your perspective, what were the most noteworthy news articles you read last month? Last year?

Having a fast answer to those questions gives you a sense of agency, direction, and perspective. A mechanism enabling that capability enhances your working memory, allowing you to easily find references and improve your feel for trends, focus areas, and patterns.

Knowledge In, Knowledge Out

At the time of this writing, it’s not viable to train an AI to reliably detect articles you think are worth remembering. There are automated services that will tell you what you should be interested in, but if you want to read and think for yourself, you are going to need to read and record link references yourself. Preferably just after you’ve finished reading an article so you don’t have to skim through it again later just to remember why it was memorable.

To save a memorable link reference, you’ll need to save the URL (or equivalent reference identification), and the reason why you are saving it. For retrieval, an overall rating and tags are extremely useful, but the most important thing is to record why you are saving the link. Your notes will trigger your memory later. They’re the foundation for insight and perspective.

The Flow

If you are going to record memorable links, you need a quick and easy way to do it. A handy button that doesn’t work in all situations is going to skew your memory towards only the sources that support the handy button. There are two reliable ways that work across all devices and sites:

Mail it in Copy the link location, mail it to yourself with the reason why it you are saving it.

Use whichever you are more comfortable with for your situation at the time.

The Reward

Once you’ve recorded a few dozen entries, things get interesting. An extremely low noise, tightly curated expert selection of article links, each with your reason why it is noteworthy, is compelling content. That content reflects you well. It can be added to your website, made into a website on its own, serve as an RSS newsfeed for interested readers, and post through to social media channels as you want.

For your own reference, instant access to your most recent memorable links and your top rated links can be illuminating. Searching through your memorable links by text and/or keywords quickly pulls up references when you want them. Exporting a selected subset of the links you’ve remembered can form the basis for your own article or other analysis.

Membic

Membic is a free, open source, full data access tool built from scratch for managing memorable links. It handles everything described above and extends those capabilities to enable collaboration with friends or colleagues. To start getting perspective on what you read, try it out at membic.org